Mike Parker - obituary

Mike Parker was the 'Godfather of fonts’ who took Helvetica global and
suggested that Times New Roman was, in fact, stolen

Mike Parker, who has died aged 84, was known as the “Godfather of fonts” – typographical rather than ecclesiastical — and was responsible for popularising Helvetica, a lettering style which now pops up on everything from corporate logos to the washing instructions on clothing labels.

Much thought goes into designing a font, but people rarely think twice about the lettering they see all around them, their interest mildly aroused only when they scroll through the strangely-named fonts on their computers. Yet ever since Johannes Gutenberg began transforming handwritten texts into modular fonts of movable type, the art of font design has been integral to the advance of literacy and modern civilisation.

The Bible printed by Gutenberg in 1455 used an old German ornate “blackletter” font; the fluid lines of “Garamond” (which Parker studied for a Master’s degree at Yale) emerged from the pen of Claude Garamond, a French publisher and “punch-cutter” of the 16th century (who also gave us “Grecs du Roi”, “Granjon” and “Sabon”). Most of today’s newspaper typefaces derive from the “Roman” typefaces of another 16th-century printer, the Dutchman Hendrik van den Keere.

The late 19th century saw a renewed interest in font design, led in Britain by members of the Arts and Crafts movement. In the early 20th century perhaps the most famous letter designer, Eric Gill, designed nearly a dozen fonts, including “Perpetua” and “Gill Sans”, the latter becoming the standard typography for Britain’s railway system and featuring on Penguin Books’ classic jacket designs of the 1930s.

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Helvetica’s roots, as the name suggests, were Swiss. It began life as “Neue Haas Grotesk”, developed by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein in 1957 — when Swiss designers were promoting the idea of “rational typefaces” to suit the ethos of the modern industrial age. The pair tweaked a 60-year-old German font, stripping off unnecessary fripperies such as the small flourishes at the end of letter strokes known as serifs, to produce a clean and simple typeface.

A sign on the New York Subway in Helvetica (ALAMY)

Parker, then working as assistant to Jackson Burke, director of typographic development at the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, spotted the font, liked its clarity and set to work to adapt it, renamed Helvetica, for the company’s linotype machines that then led the world in book and newspaper typesetting technology.

In 1961 Parker succeeded Burke as Mergenthaler’s director of typographic development. He went on to develop some 1,000 fonts, but Helvetica was the one that really took off. From the 1960s onwards it became a popular choice for public signage and commercial logos such as those for Société Générale, Nestlé, 3M, BMW, Kawasaki, Lufthansa, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Motorola and Panasonic.

Helvetica entered the digital age by securing a place among the 11 fonts bundled with Apple’s early desktop computers, and the company continued to use it widely in devices such as the iPod. In Britain its rather bland functionality commended it to state-run monoliths such as British Rail, which adapted it into its own Rail Alphabet font (which was also adopted by the NHS and the British Airports Authority).

However, while Helvetica became dominant in the public world, it never really took off on the printed page, research showing that serif typefaces are easier for users to read in book-length stretches of text. While some criticised Helvetica as nondescript and dull, Parker waxed lyrical about its aesthetic appeal: “The meaning is in the content of the text, and not in the typeface,” he explained in a 2007 documentary. “It’s not a letter that’s bent to shape; it’s a letter that lives in a powerful matrix of surrounding space. What it’s all about is the interrelationship of the negative shape, the figure/ground relationship, the shapes between characters and within characters... Oh, it’s brilliant when it’s done well.”

Wall Street Subway station showing Helvetica signage (ALAMY)

The son of an American mining engineer, Michael Russell Parker was born in London on May 1 1929. The family returned to America after the Blitz and settled in Rye, New York State. Mike was educated at boarding schools, where he became interested in painting, only to discover that he was colour-blind. Instead he took a degree at Yale University in Architecture, followed by a Master’s in Design.

After graduation he got a job at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, whose extensive historical typography collection inspired his fascination with fonts. Returning to America, he joined Mergenthaler in 1959.

By the beginning of the 1980s, however, revenues from the sale of typesetting equipment were dwindling; and as the digital age dawned Parker saw a business opportunity in the design and sale of fonts themselves — independent of equipment. In 1981 he left Mergenthaler and, with Matthew Carter, established Bitstream, a company based at Cambridge, Massachusetts, which became the first in the world to produce digital fonts that could be licensed for use by anyone.

The company was highly successful in the 1980s, when desktop publishing and personal computer use took off. In the Nineties, however, Parker lost money attempting to develop a joint venture with Steve Jobs which never quite came off.

Parker’s knowledge of the history of font design was exhaustive. In 1994 he created a stir when he published evidence that the design of Times New Roman, credited to the British typographer Stanley Morison in 1931, was based on 1904 drawings by the American Starling Burgess, which, he suggested, had been stolen in the 1920s.

Subsequently Parker became consultant and type historian for the Font Bureau, a typeface design foundry, and in 2009 he launched a font called Starling, based on Burgess’s original designs.

Parker’s two marriages were dissolved. He is survived by his ex-wife Sibyl who cared for him in his final years, by a son and two daughters and two stepdaughters.

Mike Parker, born May 1 1929, died February 23 2014

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